XVScan

I did a search on DejaNews (http://www.dejanews.com/) while researching this review, to see if I could find any negative comments people had posted to Usenet about XVScan. I couldn't find any.

Manufacturer: tummy.com, ltd.

Phone: 970-223-8215; Fax: 408-490-2728

E-Mail/URL: xvscan@tummy.com

URL: http://www.tummy.com/xvscan/

Price: $50 US for ftp or e-mail shippingAdditional
$15 US for media in the United States$25 US internationally

Platforms: Linux, HP-UX, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, SunOS and
Solaris

Reviewer: Michael Montoure

I'm a little biased—I had been happily using John Bradley's
xv image manipulation software long before I ever heard of XVScan.
So when I heard that someone had added the ability to acquire
images from an HP ScanJet scanner to xv, I was immediately
intrigued. Sean Reifschneider, who wrote the software, posted the
following message to comp.os.linux.hardware in 1995:

When I first got the ScanJet I wrote a
hpscanpbm (I don't think the real one was
available then, and anyway, it only took 4 hours) that I used for a
couple of months until I could get the time to write something
better.

The end result is “XVScan”, a scanning
extension to XV. While the “hpscanpbm” worked okay, this is about
a thousand times better. I mean, I used to do the scan, load it
into xv, and maybe I'd have to tweak, re-load, etc... Now I can
just scan directly into XV.

Now, if you've never used xv, you might not understand my
enthusiasm for it; it is, after all, a simple, straightforward
tool. It certainly isn't in the same league as PhotoShop, but it's
good at what it does—reading and writing files in a dozen
different formats, window capturing, color-map editing, cropping
and some fairly interesting image manipulation algorithms. In
short, while it may not have all the fancy bells and whistles, it
does have those things I use on a regular basis when manipulating
images.

Installation

XVScan should run with any version of Linux—it's been tested
with the 1.2.x and 2.0.x kernels, but it hasn't been tested with
MkLinux yet. (Mac users—if you try this and get it to work, let
tummy.com know—they're interested.) XVScan requires built-in
generic SCSI driver support—no earlier than version 1.1.79. You
don't need Motif, and you can use any version of XFree (X11R5,
X11R6).

If you're not running Linux, you can also run XVScan under
HP-UX, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, SunOS and Solaris—although if you're using
Solaris and require SG, the generic pass-through SCSI driver, there
is an extra charge.

XVScan was installed by Peter Struijk, one of SSC's Systems
Administrators, before I started using it. A few minutes of looking
through the documentation for XVScan makes installation seem easy,
as Peter confirmed.

There's a setup program, used by the INSTALL-xvscan script,
that searches your hardware for a scanner—namely, a SCSI ScanJet
scanner, the only type XVScan can currently use. If one is found,
the script creates the /dev/scanjet device file. Seems
straightforward to me. In the Linux version, if XVScan can't find a
scanner attached to the SCSI chain, you can still use the regular
xv functions—just the scanning is disabled. Peter tells me the
only tricky business is to remember that if in the future you
change any of your SCSI devices, you must rerun this setup program;
otherwise, XVScan will no longer be able to find the
scanner.

Some users, apparently, even pick up XVScan just to have an
easy-to-install, pre-built copy of xv. This makes sense when you
consider that the $50 price tag includes the $25 xv license fee,
it's distributed with full source code and updates are free for the
first year.

Getting Started

When I first started up XVScan, my first thought was, “This
looks exactly like xv”--and it does. Only when you look at the
Control menu do you notice the addition of a
Scanner button that, when clicked, brings up the
scanning window in which the scanned image is displayed. Other
differences are even less apparent. Another change from the normal
release of xv are the defaults used when XVScan starts.

By default, XVScan turns on -nolimits,
which lets images be larger than your screen—sometimes much, much
larger. I suppose I can see the point of doing this, but I found it
annoying not to have the image appear as a small, convenient window
I could easily move around on my screen.

On the other hand, the other default it changes is that
-rwcolor--read/write color entries—is set
“on” at startup. Thus, any color editing I do to the image
happens in real time, without having to manually
Apply changes. That's kind of nice—I like
it.

According to the documentation, both of these default options
can be disabled. The documentation is handled nicely. When you
click on the scanning window's Help button, it
automatically launches a web browser that points at the on-line
documentation at http://www.tummy.com/xvscan/. Therefore, you never
have to remember their URL, and you don't have to keep a copy of
their documentation on your hard drive. Of course, if you don't
have an Internet connection up all the time, you might not find
this so convenient.

The scanning window can be a little daunting to a first-time
user, as you're immediately presented with a display of options,
controls and buttons (see Figure 1). I suppose that's unavoidable
for a program this flexible, but at first I was a little worried
about the program's apparent complexity.